Monday, January 08, 2007

Shemos 1 - Egyptian linguistics

It was pointed out to me some years back that the Egyptian names that appear in Chumash seem to have a vastly different letter distribution than the rest of Chumash. To jot down a few of the names and words that we recently came across that appear to be of Egyptian origins (I apologize for the use of this cryptic transliteration scheme):

PR'AH
TzPNT P'ANE
PTM
R'AMSS
ShPRH
PW'AH

28 letters. According to the usual distribution of letters in the Torah, a random selection of letters of this size should contain in it 1.0 aynin, 0.4 pei-in, and 1.6 reishin instead of the 4 aynin, 6 pei-in, and 3 reishin that are actually present. Other words that contain these letters include TzPRD'A, a word that looks decidedly un-Hebrew and that appears only (to my recollection) in next week's parsha and EPR'A, a Pharaoh who's mentioned in Yirmiyah 44:30 (admittedly an entirely different era than the one currently under consideration).

R' Yaakov Kaminetsky, as quoted in a Peninim article from Vayechi 5762, notes that the Pei and Reish are also both found in the name of Ephraim, Yosef's younger son, thereby showing that Yosef had begun to consider himself more Egyptian by that point.

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